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DesignfoAllIndia_Jan 2012
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A random selection of photos of active PwD.
As Wayne Roberts would have it - City planning is a mechanism id discrimination - it mainly serves the able-bodied. See his article in Now Toronto:
Source:Okay, I admit it, the Canadian Urban Institute's new report doesn't exactly have a catchy title.
But don't be deceived - Repositioning Age-Friendly Communities: Opportunities To Take AFC Mainstream, far from being a staid policy tract, is actually counselling a radical shakeup in the way cities plan.
The operative phrase is "universal design," and the idea is to cease and desist creating public infrastructure that privileges one particular group, whether it's car drivers, the able-bodied or those with paycheques, and start envisioning people with parallel but not identical mobility and sociability needs: children, teens, seniors, new immigrants, those on low incomes, parents, those with sports injuries or with physical and mental limitations, and those who care for any of the above.
Did I leave anyone out? This is a new paradigm for democratic planning, and, as the CUI report points out, you get to its essence when you apply the seniors test. "Design for the young and you exclude the old; design for the old and you include everyone," the report quotes late UK gerontologist Bernard Isaacs as saying.
Announcing the Inclusive Tourism Marketing Toolkit Workbook for collecting key information on Accommodation and Resorts Prepared by Travability Pty. Ltd. Phone 0417 690 533 Email bill@travability.travel
Forrester - Accommodation
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Former Thai Tourism Chief Says Industry Has "Lost Focus," Needs New Roadmap
(First in a multi-part series of dispatches on the Thai tourism industry 25 years after Visit Thailand Year)
BANGKOK: 25 years after the historic 1987 Visit Thailand Year, a number of industry veterans are voicing concern about the state of the industry and its future directions. With the number of arrivals skyrocketing, and future growth almost guaranteed for a host of reasons, there is apprehension about the growing gap between quality and quantity. A substantial consensus is emerging for the industry to start adopting the sufficiency economy philosophy of King Bhumibhol Adulyadej as a future development strategy.
One industry veteran speaking out is former Tourism Authority of Thailand Governor Dharmnoon Prachuabmoh, who was one of the key planners of 1987 Visit Thailand Year, played a major role in another industry landmark, the 1992 Visit ASEAN Year (VAY) and also spent years on the PATA board of directors, including a stint as chairman. He feels that the Ministry of Tourism and Sports has not lived up to expectations, the country's huge popular island resorts are in need of carrying capacity controls and there is a long overdue requirement for quality human resources development institutions. He also feels the visa-regimes need to be revisited to better balance security concerns and tourism earnings.
His views are supported by other industry veterans such as Mr. Prapansak Bhatayanond, former General Manager of the Erawan hotel before it became the Grand Hyatt, Mr. Opas Netra-umpai, a former senior executive of the TAT and Mrs Bilaibhan Sampatsiri, owner and managing director of the Swissotel Nailert Park and chairman of the Siam Society, one of Thailand's foremost heritage and cultural organisations. Mrs Bilaibhan especially is concerned about whether one of the bedrocks of Thai tourism, its deep-rooted culture, is being gradually eroded both by tourism as well as all the surrounding winds of change sweeping through Thailand.
Full story:
OpenTravel Alliance (OpenTravel), a travel industry distribution specification and standards development organization, announces the publication of the 2011B version of its schema.
Included in this version were some changes to hotel schema that focused on a subset of the 2010 ADA(Americans with Disabilities Act) legislation that specifically applies to electronic hotel reservations and includes:
- Identifying and describing accessible features
- Reserving, upon request, accessible guest rooms or specific types of guest rooms and ensuring that the guest rooms requested are blocked and removed from all reservations system inventory
- Guaranteeing the specific accessible guest room
"However, we all know that for this work to be truly effective and successful, it is fundamental that the travel distribution industry now implement it as fast as possible and hotels and other providers of accessible accommodation then ensure accurate and reliable information is provided to travelers with disabilities worldwide."
The 2011B version also contains updates to hotel, airline, tours/activities and golf messages, along with new messages for railways and ground transportation companies. To download the 2011B version free of charge, visit www.opentravel.org.
Forrester - Accommodation
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Centre for disability studies inaugurated
GUWAHATI: The Gauwahati University, in collaboration with NTPC Limited, started an information communication training centre (ITC) at the department of disability study on Wednesday. The aim behind this training center is to encourage students with disability to pursue higher education in the field of science and technology.
Source: CBR Forum - E- News Bulletin
From DREDF:
Transportation
Access to public transportation is a key to independence and full community participation for people with disabilities. The Americans with Disabilities Act sets forth specific requirements for transit systems including fixed route buses, light and heavy rail systems, ADA complementary paratransit, over-the-road buses, shuttles, and other forms of publicly and privately-funded public transportation. DREDF advocates for the development and implementation of strong, comprehensive ADA transportation requirements, works toward additional accessible transportation service, and provides in-depth training for people with disabilities and others on ADA transportation that includes current policy developments and best practices.
More:
From Michael Janger:
In advertising, the inclusion of people with disabilities is a double-edged sword: is it intended to highlight the disability, or the person, or both? If the disability is highlighted, it is usually because the business is selling products that accommodate the disability.
For companies that do not directly sell to people with disabilities, utilizing a person with a disability in an advertisement is a delicate exercise, because popular culture in America today tends to exclude people with disabilities from its meme. The good news: this is not the 1950's, as people today are more aware of the economic power and influence of people with disabilities and their contributions to society. Yet if advertising practices today are any indication, people with disabilities still have a long way to go to be considered an integral part of popular culture. In a country where almost 20% of the population has a disability, this is a big slice of American society we are missing out on.
Two weeks ago, Target announced a special post-Christmas sale for kids' t-shirts ($5 each!) and kids' pants ($7 each!), through this advertisement on its website. It was just like any other promotion peddled by one of the United States's largest department stores. As with most retailers recovering from the Christmas shopping season, Target needed to clear out its inventory, and the $5 and $7 sales were meant to grab the attention of consumers and encourage them to buy clothes for their kids.
Rick Smith noticed something about this advertisement, only because of his own one-year-old son, who has Down syndrome. On the left side of the Target advertisement was a blond-haired kid wearing an orange- and brown-colored long-sleeve shirt. If you saw this kid and did not think twice, you were probably like most others who were interested in the shirt he wore and whether they should buy it from Target.
This ad needs no caption.
Target did not highlight the fact that Ryan Langston - the name of the kid in the orange shirt - has Down syndrome. He has some of the classic physical features of this condition, but that was not the point of the advertisement. All Target was doing was selling kid's apparel, and using cute kids to send the message. They did not even announce the kid in any of its press releases.
Thrilled about the non-announcement of Ryan and his disability, Rick Smith wrote about Target's advertisement on his blog, Noah's Dad. Disability advocates and others saw his post, and in a matter of hours it went viral. Rick told me, two days after his post, of his amazement at finding over 8,000 likes on his blog post (it is now over 21,000 as of this writing).
Read more:
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Slowly, slowly, very slowly the imperative of Universal Design as urban planning is trickling into US thought. Here John Lorinc helps the process along:
When he worked as the parks commissioner in Bogotá, Gil Penalosa helped trigger a quality of urban life revolution of sorts by promoting car-free Sundays - "ciclovias" -- on hundreds of kilometers of the streets around the Colombian capital. As this video shows, over 1.3 million residents each week would take to their bikes or participate in festivals and activities throughout Bogotá. In so doing, they boosted both their enjoyment of the city and their own fitness levels, thus creating a lively, low-emission sense of community for people from all walks of life, so to speak.
In his current gig as the executive director of Toronto-based 8-80 Cities, Penalosa travels the world with a trenchant question that arose out of those experiences: how do we create cities in which both 8-year-olds and 80-year-olds can move about safely and enjoyably? "We have to stop building cities as if everyone is 30 years-old and athletic," he says.
His 8 to 80 litmus test involves imagining a public space, but especially a busy city street or intersection, and asking whether it is suitable for young and old alike. In all too many locations - signalized crossings on wide suburban arterials, narrow bike lanes, over-taxed sidewalks, etc. - the answer will be no.
By way of solutions, Penalosa's group has advised cities like Seville and Guadalajara on the importance of more accessible surface transit, improved cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, and more programmable park space.
But in many aging societies, where the proportion of seniors will grow as much as four-fold over the next two decades, public space improvements alone won't make large urban areas, especially car-dependent suburbs, more suitable to the needs of older residents. Indeed, one of the most difficult questions facing urban areas is how they will go about making themselves more age-friendly.
Accessibility is obviously a big piece of the puzzle. In Japan, where the aging curve is further along, planning officials and architects have promoted "universal design" principles that can be found in such amenities as multi-generational housing meant to address the shortage of caregivers.
Read more:
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/01/8-80-problem-designing-cities-young-and-old/959/
Universal Design: The Seven Principles
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A paper by Bill Forrester on sustaining Inclusive Tourism:
An Economic Model of Disability And Inclusion
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Here is a very good article on the boundaries of disability bySarah Wanenchak:
My post today comes from a class on ableism and disabled bodies that I taught earlier this past semester in my Social Problems course. Its inception came from the point at which I wanted to introduce my students to Donna Haraway's concept of cyborgs, because I saw some useful connections between one and the other.
My angle was to begin with the idea of able-bodied society's instinctive, gut-level sense of discomfort and fear regarding disabled bodies, which is outlined in disability studies scholar Fiona Kumari Campbell's book Contours of Ableism. Briefly, Campbell distinguishes between disableism, which are the set of discriminatory ideas and practices that construct the world in such a way that it favors the able-bodied and marginalizes the disabled, andableism, which is the set of constructed meanings that set disabled bodies themselves apart as objects of distaste and discomfort. In this sense, disabled bodies are imbued with a kind of queerness - they are Other in the most physical sense, outside and beyond accepted norms, unknown and unknowable, uncontrollable, disturbing in how difficult they are to pin down. Campbell identifies this quality of unknowability and uncontainability as especially, viscerally horrifying.
Campbell connects more directly to Haraway's cyborgs when she opens a discussion of biotechnology and disabled bodies:
Universal Design expert Mary Jo Peterson:
A short "silent film" melodrama on the power of just one look. Reactions?
Reposting:
The simple truth is "nobody stops moving." Whether it is moving through space, or time, or relationships travel is both metaphor and a concrete reality. A few of us have dedicated significant portions of our lives to making travel possible for those who experience disabilities. Here is what we have discovered.
Inclusive tourism
We can create the built world around a more realistic and inclusive image of what it is to be human. Meanwhile we work with what we cannot change about our bodies and do the same things as everyone else - but sometimes a bit differently.
We call what we are promoting "Inclusive Tourism." We mean social inclusion; full participation.
The moral impulse for social inclusion is enshrined in national laws like the ADA, various Anti Discrimination Acts, and the UN's Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities. The practical tools for achieving this inclusion flow from the seven principles and eight goals of Universal Design.
Universal Design is "a framework for the design of places, things, information, communication and policy to be usable by the widest range of people operating in the widest range of situations without special or separate design." As we succeed in convincing more and more destinations that it is not only the "right thing to do" (even where laws don't mandate it) we show them the studies documenting that it is the profitable thing to do. With the industry coming to an awareness of how it can profit from us as customers - the US market of people with disabilities spending $ 13.6 annually (OD Market Study, 2002, 2005) - solo travel becomes physically possible.
Disability - a motivation for travel
Sometimes the very predictability of daily activities related to a disability is enough to spur one to travel. Consider these routine-breakers:
- If regular kidney dialysis is part of your lifestyle then taking one of several dialysis cruises available each year might determine your itinerary - at least until Endeavour Safaris is able to secure funding for a planned fully accessible game reserve lodge with dialysis.
- If you want to cruise but need oxygen, or a machine to help with breathing, Special Needs at Sea specializes in what you are looking for. Your solo travel might be limited to a few stolen moments in port but, if you are Deaf, the annual RCCL Deaf Cruise provides hospitality unrivaled by any other experience on the water - with the possible exception of chartering your own yacht through Waypoint Yacht Charter Services
- Trekking and backcountry camping offer a wrap-around silence that is appropriate to solo travel. If you have a mobility impairment maybe you want a Eureka wheelchair-friendly tent designed by Blue Sky Designs combined with a Marvel Wheelchair, the Kilmanjaro-climbing wheelchair used by Jesse Owens, or SideStix super-strong sport crutches. Consider carrying the Spot GPS device for safety. (http://www.rollingrains.com/2008/07/usability-review-the-spot-personal-safety-device.html )
- Adventure sports are a good antidote to stereotypes about disability. White water rafting in Canada, hot air ballooning in the UK, wildlife safaris and bungee jumping in South Africa, elephant rides in Thailand, or zipline trips in Brazil are all easy to arrange. These days there are many specialist travel agents, tour operators, and publications to help with trip planning. I always suggest starting with Candy Harrington's work including her Emerging Horizons web site and magazine. She also has several books including "Barrier-Free Travel: A Nuts And Bolts Guide For Wheelers And Slow Walkers.
Going the distance.
"Step over the finish line." That was the advice coming from the radio as I sped northward alone toward the Canadian border at dawn. Travel writer Rick Steves was interviewing Norman Fischer author of the mythic solo travelogue "Sailing Home." Steves' point was about being transformed at the end of a journey. When you get to the destination , Steves said, "Go beyond the souvenir shop. Go over the finish line. Discover what only that place has to offer."
Captivated by the radio dialogue, passing not far from Rick's home at the time, I was on my way to oversee modification of a 42 foot catamaran in Bellingham Washington. The project added a bosun's chair so that, with some help, I could "sling myself over the finish line" onto the boat and sail out onto the bay.
Too often the logistical barriers of travel become handicapping for someone with a disability. Little energy, imagination, or finance remains to wander beyond the finish line and be immersed in the spirit of a place. With projects like this catamaran my 89 year old father, and friends from his assisted living community, will be among the first to use the bosun's chair as they take the new "aerial route" aboard. A physical barrier is removed and a new set of life-enhancing possibilities becomes available to a whole community of people.
There's a paradox to solo travel. It is there in the value we call inter-dependence which forms the heart of disability culture.
Unfamiliar environments remind us that even the simplest activities require us to rely on others. Environments that were never built for people with disabilities in the first place open that level of awareness to us permanently.
Solo travel, from the outside, looks like the ultimate in asserting independence. Yet we know from the inside that it is really a way of deeply connecting with persons and place. By paring travel down to the essentials the solo traveler feels the consequences of their individual choices with a new immediacy. Solo travel is a lot like living with a disability.
*This article was originally published in the Solo Traveler blog.
